=The Life and Writings of Kant= (1724–1804). The external changes in the life of Immanuel Kant were the fewest possible. He was born at Königsberg in 1724; he went to the school of that city and then to its university, and then acted in the capacity of tutor in families in the province of Königsberg. He became privat-docent in the university at the age of thirty-one, and professor of logic and metaphysics at the age of forty-four. He was called to the University of Halle in 1778, but he refused to leave Königsberg. In fact, Kant never went outside the province, and but little outside the city. Nevertheless, in the eighties he saw himself become the most important figure in Königsberg, and in the nineties the most important power in German academic circles. In 1794 he came under the censure of the reactionary government of Frederick William II and “was obliged to refrain in the future from all public addresses on religion.” This was the only outer conflict in his life. In 1804, at the age of eighty, he died. The externals of his life were from the beginning to the end an undeviating routine,――his lectures, his daily walk, his dinner with friends, his hours of reflection upon his great problem. These have been made the subject of many descriptions.[54] The life of Kant is notable because it is the history of an unusual singleness of devotion to the solution of a speculative problem. His youthful point of departure was the rationalism of Wolff; his point of attainment was the _Critique of Pure Reason_. Between these two points his history was a series of mental reversals. Kant spoke of his life as divided into two parts at the year 1770; his pre-critical and his critical periods. At that time there was a change in the form as well as the content of his writings. His pre-critical writings possess a graceful, flowing style; his critical works are heavy and artificial in their structure, and reveal the labor with which his thought tried to reconcile contending _motifs_. So far as the content of Kant’s thought is concerned the pre-critical period will be seen to fall into two subdivisions at the year 1760. Kant’s life may therefore be divided into three epochs: (1) 1724–1760, the period when he was a Wolffian rationalist; (2) 1760–1770, the period when he was an empirical skeptic; (3) 1770–1804, the period when he was a critical epistemologist.